Friday, December 13, 2013

Master Class: Beyoncé’s “Visual Album”

It was the mic drop heard ‘round the world.

Beyoncé’s sudden, stunning announcement that she had not
only recorded an entire new album while on tour, but released it at the exact
moment it was announced, in the absence of any advance publicity and nary a
clue of its existence, made the news rounds late last night and into this
morning. As expected, social media exploded in mass hysteria. For music lovers,
this was the equivalent of an atomic bomb, consuming and destroying everything
in its path. Imagine if the Beatles went on the news unannounced in 1968, carted in a
crate of LPs, said “this is Abbey Road.
It’s available as of right now. Enjoy,” then left.

Today, the “normal” process of promoting music these days is
for artists to Tweet the existence of a single, whether or not it was already
sent to radio or made available. Publicists work overtime to ensure maximal
exposure for their client. In the late twentieth century, we waited with bated
breath for the radio to play a newly-announced song, or hope and pray that a
bootleg would make the rounds and we’d pass them around on cassettes or
white-label CDs. I remember the promotion behind Madonna’s radio premiere of “You
Must Love Me” from the then-to-be-released Evita,
which was met with a collective shrug from the record-buying public. People waited for the product from the
superstar. It was expected that we would accord it respect. Nowadays, artists
are at the mercy of the public, each trying to command attention over the sound
and fury until such time that everyone was talking over one another, and the
audience stops caring. Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga did this more than once
this year, and both attracted negative publicity (in Justin’s case, it didn’t
hurt his album sales, but in Gaga’s situation it was decidedly more
detrimental). The artists didn’t let their music speak.

Beyoncé’s masterstroke is that she pushed the entire work
directly into the marketplace. Why just Tweet that there’s a song available in
advance of an album and making videos in a rush after the singles were pushed out?
Here are some ways in which the new album has radically subverted the rules of
the game, and reflects how we consume and discuss music. This is not an evaluation of
the disc’s artistic merits (lack thereof), but an exploration of how we regard this particular artist in the celebrity ecosystem.

Go directly to the
marketplace. There’s this terrific article in The Guardian explaining that Bey went directly to the audience. It’s the equivalent of her
showing up in the middle of a crowded mall, setting up a kiosk, and quietly waiting
for people to appear and buy out her stock. There was no advance publicity, no
built-up anticipation. One could argue that Beyoncé’s been on tour for most of
the year and that would be publicity enough, but she never betrayed the fact
that this album was being made at that time, let alone released. We would have
expected an album at some point in the future, but traditionally it would not
be in the middle of the tour, and certainly not while she’s still promoting
material from her last album two years ago. It’s even more rare that she chose
to do so during the all-important fourth quarter of the year, when people buy
music in greater numbers than the rest of the year due to the holiday rush.

Silence = respect.
Consider the multitude of artists who contributed to this album: Frank Ocean,
Justin Timberlake, Pharrell, Timbaland, Sia (the most unexpected collaborator
of all) and her mercurial husband Jay-Z. She’s stacked the deck with tremendous
talent and not a single one of them have breathed a word. It’s a testament to
how she is so respected that she commands such respect. Virtually every other
artist has had a track “leaked” (intentionally or not), but nothing was said
here to anyone. Perhaps they didn’t even know, and assumed it would be released
a year from now, after the tour? This release was so sudden and unexpected that
for once, Wikipedia didn’t have any information on the album – not even a page –
within an hour of the disc’s release. Given how so many celebrities plead for “privacy”
and yet are photographed leaving their yoga class, here is a request truly met
and accorded respect.

Silence is louder
than Tweets. While the likes of Madonna, Gaga and Miley madly try to
get people to pay attention by espousing on everything and nothing at once, we
hear relatively little from Beyoncé. Even her self-directed (and deceptively “intimate”)
documentary Life is But a Dream conveys
little substance of her private life. Contrast this with Mariah Carey, who has
been on TV almost every day this week broadcasting from her well-appointed
Manhattan home. What has Bey said about this? Absolutely nothing, other than a
Facebook post, and singular pictures on Instagram and her Tumblr. She’s busy
with her tour, you see, and tending to motherhood. For someone everyone talks
about, it’s curious that Beyoncé herself says so little, yet what she
did with the stealth album drop said a lot.

The single does
not command the marketplace. It’s no secret that there’s not much money
in purchasing music. The public buys the singles they want at a fraction of the
entire album cost. Single purchases far outweigh album sales, and committing to
downloading a full disc is a greater commitment from the public. (The real
money is in tours, anyway.) By dropping the album with no advance publicity and
not identifying one particular song as “the lead single”, the sudden onslaught
of new music is too much for her public. We can’t just buy the one single and
wait two months for her to announce the next one: there is no single. This way, we have no choice but to listen to the
entire work and determine for ourselves what the standout tracks – should there
be any – truly are. Consider that Lady Gaga’s “Applause” was met with derision
and relatively mixed reviews in advance of her latest work. Despite being a hit
single, her latest disc artPOP is
selling respectable but hardly spectacular numbers, by superstar standards. For
the press surrounding her Vegas show, the once-indomitable Britney Spears’s new
platter has anemic sales.
It can be argued that the lead single hurt the album by tainting its image
prior to release. Beyoncé went through a similar situation when “Run the World
(Girls)” was met with a relatively soft commercial reception prior to the
release of her 2011 album 4. By dropping
the entire disc at once, she neatly sidesteps this negative publicity, and
compels us to return to old patterns of buying entire albums.

Image control.
Beyoncé is not the first artist to release an entire video album accompanying
each track (including non-singles) with a clip. That would be Annie Lennox, who
did so for 1992’s landmark Diva album
(for which she won the Grammy for Best Long-Form Music Video). However, the
release of the disc as a concept “visual album” with bonus videos, feeds into
our fascination with Mrs. Carter. To keep herself in the conversation by saying
so little, we then look into her Tumblr and Instagram to determine if any of
the images in the videos were silently released in her sites. Did she leave
clues? Was she hiding a secret in plain sight, and nobody caught on? And
therein continues the virtuous cycle: Bey’s killer instinct and business sense
helps her understand when people are weary of celebrity, and when to back off. The
combination of the album and video compilation maximal release is both
manifestation of ego and maximal output all at once, forcing the viewer and
listener to judge the work on its own. Not for nothing is she supreme in imagecontrol.

Confirmation of
iconic status. Beyoncé is also not the first artist this year to do the
stealth album drop. That would be David Bowie, whose The Next Day turned out to be one of the year’s very best discs.
The difference is that Bowie preceded the disc by shipping a single to radio,
then released the album a few months later, with little to no other
publicity accompanying it. It still hewed more closely to the "traditional" publicity pattern than what Bey did. Only an artist with a captive audience would dare
try it. There are a few who may pull off this trick, and Bey proved she is one
of them. What's breathtaking about her strategy, more so than Bowie's, is that she dropped in the
midst of her tour, a time that is so exhaustive and all-consuming for her
professionally that one would not imagine she would have the time or energy to create
an entire new work that some artists take an entire year off to produce. True
to form, the album crashed on iTunes several times due to the overwhelming sudden
demand.

The music itself.
Is it any good? Is it bad? Is it great, or both? At this point it becomes a
moot point. All the emotion surrounding anticipated new music and its actual
release have been truncated and amalgamated overnight into the span of just a
few short hours. The stealth drop of the album has neatly sidestepped all of
the discussion by presenting the music as-is, compelling fans to buy it and
completely avoiding the tide of potentially negative publicity (and yes, it’s
pretty damn good). The videos clearly have ambition, scope, scale and budget to
carry out her vision. It is a celebration of the artist and her life,
confessional and dramatic. Perhaps this is the wave of the future, pop music as
grand opera?

In any event, I’ll be spending copious amounts of time
studying this work, deciphering clues and gaining insight into at once the most
public and yet enigmatic musical artist working today.

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About Me

"My grandmother often said, "Learn to write, Yelena, because it is a piece of bread." In the Russia of my youth, it was a prestigious thing to be a writer. Even if you had no money, people still felt your life was graced by art." - Yelena Khanga